[bkm]

Not a cryptophobe, but his rule seems reasonable: 'use it, but you won't get support if you use it for things I don't like'. Certainly better than the 'you may only use this product if you support/disavow $x' emerging trend in 'OSS' README's.

[jobigoud]

I have the same philosophy. I make an open source video analysis software, mainly used for sports technique but occasionally I get requests from people that use it in the context of hunting animals which I disapprove of. I just don't provide support in these case.

[np_tedious]

> I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.

Why would any issue be "about" crypto? Or traditional finance. Or social media. Or recipe websites. Or gardening

I'm not understanding why the content of the website / application would be an important detail of a github issue at all.

[closewith]

And yet there were issues opened which specifically reference cryptocurrencies, such as: https://github.com/aaugustin/websockets/issues/1144

[ratww]

There's several more, which is certainly much more than the author wants.

Most of them seem to be trivial coding mistakes unrelated to the library, and contributors even helped on some before closing due to the rule. The users should probably have asked on StackOverflow or something like that.

This whole ordeal actually seems much more practical than political.

If anyone wants to use this library for bitcoin, just make proper github issues.

[shrimpx]

No, I think it’s more like “I’m trying to connect to this Bitcoin tracker with your library and it doesn’t work, help pls”

[samthecoy]

Could you give some examples of this trend? (Not aware of it, personally—curious to see an example)

[st_goliath]

A while ago, some licenses started cropping up that tried to disallow certain use. E.g. the anti ICE license, anti-996 license and similar.

Bruce Perens wrote about this in late 2019[1][2], specifically focusing on the "hippocratic license", proponents of which IIRC at the time attempted to spark a debate if the Open Source definition needs to be changed, to allow discrimination like this.

[1] https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licens...

[2] https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic...

[rsynnott]

Even before that, there was the JSON.org "do no evil" license.

[rvz]

I haven't seen any example of such a trend which is why this is a very extreme position if not an irrational position to take.

> I’m aware of efforts to build proof-of-stake models. I’ll care once the total energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies drops to a non-bullshit level.

> I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.

Have we seen any creator of a deep learning library, take a similar position if not stopping any support for anyone using it for mass surveillance or burning up the planet by using their deep learning library to train it on tons of GPUs in the cloud until the data centres catch fire? I don't think so.

It's business as usual for them as the author is getting upset over PoW systems to taint all of them under the same brush despite many alternatives that are more energy efficient than others.

[kaibee]

> Have we seen any creator of a deep learning library, take a similar position if not stopping any support for anyone using it for mass surveillance or burning up the planet by using their deep learning library to train it on tons of GPUs in the cloud until the data centres catch fire? I don't think so.

I believe the original creator of YOLO actually quit for that reason.

[grnmamba]

> Have we seen any creator of a deep learning library, take a similar position if not stopping any support for anyone using it for mass surveillance?

ml5.js license:

> This license gives everyone as much permission to work with this software as possible as long as they comply with the ml5.js Code of Conduct [...]

ml5.js code of conduct:

> Do not: [...] Use ml5.js to build tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people

https://github.com/ml5js/ml5-library/blob/main/LICENSE.md

Not sure how enforcable this is but it exists.

[JD557]

I'm not sure if I would call it a trend, but I would say projects released under under "Ethical Licenses" (such as the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL)[1] or the Do No Harm License[2]) might fit the "you may only use this product if you support/disavow $x" description.

1: https://anticapitalist.software/

2: https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm

[samthecoy]

Interesting! I think there's a tangible difference between "you may only use this product if you support/disavow $x" (as in, some public statement of views is a prerequisite to being allowed to use something) and "you may only use this product if you do not cause harm in some tangible sense".

While I'm not necessarily saying I agree with either, the first is certainly less reasonable than the second (and the two examples linked are of the second kind).